Ernst-Ulrich Franzen: Citizens need to keep an eye on local governments, too

It's relatively easy to catch Hillary Clinton or Robin Vos or the Obama administration or Donald Trump when they try to hide what they're doing from the public. The bigger the fish, the easier it is to see. The trickier thing is to catch the smaller fish; the school boards and common councils; the town boards and village committees that can be just as eager to work in the shadows.

One was caught in April after the Milton School Board adjourned a meeting early because resident Lance Fena insisted on video recording the meeting, according to the Walworth County GazetteXtra: 'Halfway through Monday's meeting, Milton School Board member Rob Roy requested the camera be turned off because it made him uncomfortable and could change his behavior in the meeting. Fena refused, so the board adjourned its meeting.'

The school district then consulted its attorney and learned — lo and behold — that the board actually has no choice in the matter: It must allow the public to video record its public meetings. Why the board didn't understand that before Fena started recording, and why Roy thought that his comfort level superseded the public's right to know is still open to question. Maybe the school district could offer a remedial course in open government.

Then there's the case of the Appleton Area School District, which actually is a case because the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty has taken the district to court over an open meetings violation.

Several years ago, the district created a committee to review its ninth-grade English reading list and refused to allow the public to attend its meetings or provide public notice of them. Nor were minutes kept of the meetings or of the votes taken. No open meetings and no records. That strikes me as a pretty blatant example of slamming a door in the public's face.

'State statutes give school boards the authority to select textbooks and approve curricula for their courses,' Thomas Kamenick, associate counsel and open government specialist at WILL, said in a 2013 statement. 'When a school board delegates that authority to another body, the open meetings laws still apply.'

Kamenick was right — but, surprise, the Wisconsin Court of Appeals disagreed in a recent ruling, saying that the district did not violate the Open Meetings Law.

In an email this week, Kamenick told me, 'Instead of following the Legislature's instruction to interpret the OML broadly, the court of appeals interpreted it narrowly, concluding that the term 'rule or order' didn't apply to the board's rule or handbook because those documents merely AUTHORIZED the creation of a committee, they didn't create it directly. But several Attorney General opinions have concluded that merely authorizing the creation is good enough, for the reasons I've given. The court of appeals chose not to follow those opinions but didn't explain why not.'

Furthermore, as Bill Lueders of the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council told me in another email, 'I would say unequivocally that whether or not the school district HAD to let in interested members of the public, it should have done so. What is the point of excluding people who care about this matter?'

Well, one point might be that the district doesn't want to hear from people critical of certain books on reading lists or of the district in general. 'Please ignore the crazy crank in the corner,' is often how government officials deal with their critics. In other times and places, they have cut off public comments or ignored citizens or barred them from recording meetings.

But shutting out the public only undermines the public's confidence in government and builds walls of distrust between citizens and their representatives. And that undermines republican government no matter at what level it takes place.

WILL is right on this. I hope it eventually prevails in the courts, demonstrating again that watchful citizens are not only necessary but can be successful in catching even the little fish.